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Is Christianity Rejected Because It’s a “Low Status” Signifier?
I came across this intriguing post from Patheos’ site. The thesis is that in the aftermath of such things as the Scopes monkey trial, being a Christian has become a marker of low status, and that this explains both its decline and lack of appeal as well as the failure of attempts to “engage the culture” by making it appear hip.
The idea behind the “engaging the culture” movement was that, rather than withdrawing from the surrounding culture as their fundamentalist cousins did, evangelicals should go forth to meet it. The expected outcome of this going forth was a revival of Christian faith.
It sort of makes sense. If enough evangelicals, the idea was, could be trained to engage the surrounding culture, especially in the culture-making arenas of politics, education and the media, eventually these well-placed agents of change could turn things around.
What this plan never took into account is the dynamics of social status. Evangelicals sought to engage the culture by being relevant, by creating works of art, by offering good arguments for their positions. None of these addressed the real problem: that Christian belief simply isn’t cool, and that very few people want to lower their social status by identifying publicly with it.
I suspect that there is some truth to it. Your thoughts?
Published in Religion & Philosophy
Ehrman’s work demonstrates that the facade which many of these kids have been fed is simply not true – that the Bible was etched on stone tablets and handed down from Sinai practically, rather than what it is – and that it is a product of man’s hand, with all of the attendant biases, problems and errors which come from that sourcing.
I guess I’m still a little fuzzy on what makes you think Christianity’s claims are plausible, and not those of Zoroastrianism or Ancient Greek Mythology for that matter. Is it just that you feel they’re true… and if that’s the case, isn’t that a little bit arbitrary?
In other words, Ehrman couldn’t put doubts in my mind that hadn’t already been in my mind for years, since my childhood or early teens. Yep, that would explain the differing priors.
Why did I major in math? Why did I marry my husband, not another? If I said Christianity is intuitively appealing to me in much the same way math is, would that make any sense?
I have doubts about trusting feelings as such, but on the other hand, feelings as such have a lot to do with, say, picking a compatible spouse, finding work you don’t hate (I’ve tried overriding that in an attempt to be hard-nosed and hard-boiled, and the result was pretty disastrous), and so forth. As @mikeh would say, our feelings are a kind of evidence. We’ve just had a lonnnnnng discussion in this thread revolving around ways in which evidence may or may not be trustworthy. Evidence isn’t proof, but it’s not nothing, either.
No more extraordinary than any other claims which are of a piece with them. We shouldn’t consider their claims as being any more valid than you might consider the Bhagavad gita. This is the part that is especially fascinating to me and seems simultaneously so bizarre – out of all of the world’s faith traditions, you (and all Christians, to be fair) have settled on this one. Acceptance of this includes an implicit rejection of all other faith traditions from Islam to Jainism which declares “We are right and you are wrong.”
I mean, there’s nothing inherently bad about having confidence in your beliefs… so long as you can provide some evidence that they’re true. Otherwise, this is all just a matter of preference. You (and other Christians) prefer Jesus and his story because Jesus is nice or something. But there’s no evidence which can be pointed to which makes Jesus both nice and correct.
I might prefer Newtonian mechanics because they provide relatively simple and powerful insights which might even get me to the Moon or Mars – but my preference for the cleanliness of the algebraic forms of Newtonian mechanics can’t overwhelm my need to use Relativity to design a GPS system. So, my preferences don’t matter to reality, and when assessing more prosaic questions like “how do we live good lives?” it seems equally important that our beliefs provide outcomes which are functional, but also proceed from bases which are true – because lashing our moral compass to the mast of this or that ship of faith runs the risk that the ship will founder.
This is explicitly what has happened in this country, and a great moral panic has ensued whereby Christians presume that unless their faith is dominant and is the “default setting” in terms of civic religion that all public morality (and civilization itself!) will be on the floor of the ocean.
It seems better to have a severability clause between morality and faith on the off-chance that something bad happens to the latter… which seems more likely than not these days.
Evidence is the sort of thing that can never hurt you to have more of.
Unless of course that evidence conflicts with people’s priors, as you’ve said.
I guess it would… but it would beg the question of “why that one and not others?” is all.
There is evidence: testimony is evidence. It’s just evidence you find insufficiently strong. I understand finding that evidence insufficiently strong. I do not understand concluding therefore it’s not evidence.
I was talking to my husband about this last night. While most 1st century Jews had an education in the Torah, it wasn’t in depth for all. Fishermen and tax collectors wouldn’t have been so well versed in the law and Torah and wouldn’t be able to put words in Jesus’s mouth.
As fishermen and tax collectors with no priors, they are more likely to take Jesus’s words as they are and less likely to impute their own knowledge into his words.
It wasn’t until after Jesus’s D&R and several years of these apostles preaching Jesus’s words that a man equipped to match Jesus’s teachings to Judaic law and Torah came along (Paul).
If what the fishermen and tax collectors were saying matched up accurately with prophecy, law, and Torah, it would have been by accident without them having decent recall of Jesus’s teachings – and even Jesus wouldn’t have been considered an authoritative source as he is referred to as a carpenter. He didn’t go to temple to take up the role of scholar and priest. He learned carpentry from Joseph.
But Paul, the scholar, was trained in the texts and was equipped to take Jesus words and we’d them to the Judaic texts.
So, on one hand, you have the textual inconsistencies that make for a more likely honest retelling, but also one that, if made up by fishermen and tax collectors, wouldn’t have had such a strong connection to the Judaic texts.
But there’s good reason to evaluate priors and evidence conjointly, rather than always privileging the evidence over the priors. Evidence can be noisy, unreliable. The instruments we use to gather evidence aren’t perfect.
A scientist working in the lab discovers he’s getting readings conflicting with established scientific theory. This is an extremely common occurrence, and usually the right thing to do is write the discrepancy off as error. What is that but privileging priors over evidence?
In order to decide, no, it’s not error, there really is something going on here not accounted for by established theory, you have to have an unusually high degree of trust (unusually high even for a scientist) in your experimental setup and your instruments of measurement – in other words, you have to have a very good reason to decide the evidence you’ve just gathered ought to weigh more than your priors.
We’re never in a position to weigh evidence by itself. It’s always in light of our priors. While dismaying in some respects, this is also a good thing, since otherwise, it’s hard to build up coherent understanding.
Maybe. Feels to me like you’re talking down to tax collectors and fishermen. Cultures have a way of getting the zeitgeist across even to the low and uneducated. 1st century Judea was a Jewish culture. I think one might imagine that a lot of Jewish thought and Torah knowledge got imparted even to the illiterate, just as Christian thought and new testament knowledge got imparted to the medieval peasantry. I’m not aware that scholarly knowledge is really necessary for these purposes.
BTW – I reject the idea of anyone with “no priors” out of hand. We can try to suss out what their priors might have been in their condition of life (probably engaging in more speculation than history in the process I suspect). But they had priors.
Now I feel like we’re making progress. The distinction I draw here is that in the rankings of evidenciary quality, “testimony alone” is incredibly weak. This is what the Bible represents for the most part, which is what I keep banging on at Auggie about. “The Gulf Breeze Sightings” are in many ways similar to the testimonies of Jesus from the Bible in that they are textual claims alone. (To be fair that particular incident was an elaborate hoax… but the phenomenon is replicated with innumerable people across this country who apparently believe it earnestly.)
When we get “Testimony” backed up with “Evidence” which corroborates the testimony, this forms a holistic narrative which has a great deal of explanatory power.
If John Smith says he saw Jane Doe shot to death, it helps to have A) Jane Doe’s body, B) a gun which shot the body and C) a person who used the gun to shoot Jane Doe.
But Smith’s testimony on its own is practically superfluous without the other elements. Smith might call the cops and say he saw this happen, and the Cops might show up and find neither A, B, or C are present. Smith could argue that C carried away A and B, but you’d think that there would be trace evidence from A like blood or other material left behind due to the shooting.
If none of those elements are present, then we must rightly become suspicious that Smith is somehow not being entirely honest or is confused in some fashion, otherwise the police will spend all of their time looking for phantom bodies of people who Smith said were killed yet vanished and aliens who illegally trespass into people’s homes to kidnap and torture them!
Now, how about if Smith shows up at the police station _50 years_ after claiming to see Jane Doe getting shot? Now we’re in especially perilous territory because Smith is unlikely to have any physical evidence he can provide about Jane’s murder which will have survived at the scene, and without a body… there’s simply no case to be had.
Testimony alone is hard to consider as “evidence.” To the extent that it is, it must be backed by actual evidence (artifacts of the happenings claimed or the like) or else it’s simply “hearsay.”
Far from it – once you’ve ruled out instrument and other error, the possibility exists that you’re doing actual science! Of course, you have the standard rules which govern what that consists of, but in this case the rules themselves (which are a kind of prior) are designed to rule out or eliminate observation or confirmation bias due to the fact that one of the rules is the requirement of independent replication and verification!
No.
Maybe because my brother played pro-baseball, I’m more aware of our limits in time and energy.
I studied and went to college. He played baseball. I’m a fat couch potato who reads too much political forums and he’s fit and athletic.
It isn’t that I’m incapable of being fit and athletic, I just use my time differently. He did poorly in school, not because he was dumb, but because he put his energy into something different.
Poor/working class are not stupid. They just have different priorities. Wealthy people have the resources to prioritize education in an environment where you really have to work for your food. I don’t see a fisherman taking a Torah scroll out on his boat. I don’t see him using his limited candle supply to read scrolls as opposed to mending his nets for tomorrow’s catch.
My brother is not stupid. He is taking free courses at MIT in programming and logic and I’m helping him. He’s intelligent. But he had a different goal that necessitated a different lifestyle.
Nope, then you’re doing science which might be exciting. All the boring times when you can’t rule out experimental and other error are just as much a part of science, too. Naturally, our thrill-seeking natures are biased toward considering the exciting parts of science “actual science!”
It’s more fun to focus on science as scientific discovery, on the times paradigms actually shifted, rather than on the routine work (the bulk of scientific work) which discovers nothing paradigm-shifting. Most anomalies (results not predicted by our prior theories) aren’t in fact evidence of the inadequacy of our prior theories, but just experimental error.
There’s always the chance, of course, that when you write off anomalies as experimental error, you’re cheating yourself of a new and exciting discovery. Nonetheless, that is usually the way to bet. The times you bet the other way are the exception, not the rule, unless you want to be an incoherent crank.
Tell that to Arno Penzia and Robert Wilson, (accidental) discoverers of the Cosmic Background Radiation.
I don’t dispute that this is the exception rather than the norm, but speaks to the need of keeping your eyes open to the possibility that you’re witnessing something important or revolutionary. But those important or revolutionary discoveries are always accompanied by a wealth of supporting data and other substantial evidence.
You had me until the last paragraph. Testimony is evidence. With all the faults you cite, but still “evidence.” And it’s not “hearsay” if it’s eyewitness. That’s the opposite of hearsay.
Huh? Did you read beyond my first, tongue in cheek, sentence?
Moreover, hearsay is evidence, just evidence too weak to be admissible in court. Courts have strict rules of evidence for a reason. The rules for scientific evidence are even stricter.
Nonetheless, the bulk of our experience takes place outside the lab and the courtroom, where evidence too weak to convict someone of crime or overturn established scientific paradigms nonetheless proves helpful for our lives. For example, it’s smart for women to take hearsay evidence of who’s a grabby creep into account when deciding who they’ll risk being alone with, especially if that person would be in a position of authority over them. It can be rewarding to try a new restaurant just because a friend of a friend said it was good. And so on.
(As for hearsay about who’s a grabby creep. Sometimes you trust the hearsay, sometimes you don’t. It would be stupid for women to assume it’s all untrustworthy just because it’s hearsay, though. Hearsay evidence isn’t as “loud” as more definite forms of evidence, but it’s a mistake to assume it’s all just background noise.)
I was abducted by aliens. That’s my testimony. Is this sufficient evidence to settle the question re: the existence of aliens and whether or not they’re interested in probing people like me? You see the problems inherent to this.
Perhaps the language is simply failing us here and we need to add some sort of modifier like “corroborated testimony” in order to bring it up to a level of respectability. Eyewitness shouldn’t be that impressive to us when people are making claims which are absurd on their face. If you tell me that Elvis just walked into your office and needed some legal advice regarding getting his estate back from being dead… but you can’t produce Elvis, your eyewitness doesn’t count for very much, does it?
Also worth noting: everything in the gospels is essentially hearsay. This is especially true of most of the stories of Jesus’ early life, and only very little of the overall narrative is actually something which the alleged authors of these could have borne witness to which would raise it above the level of hearsay.
And I don’t dispute exceptions happen, and it’s worth keeping a feeler out. What’s important is that attachment to priors at the apparent expense of evidence is a rational part of science, too, when we judge that maybe this dataset seems “loud” but our prior theory nonetheless seems “louder”.
It sounds like “gossip.” I will say that merely because something is gossip doesn’t mean you should entirely discount it, but once information has traded hands several times, the underlying signal is typically so mutated and warped from its original intent as to become a liability.
A warning of the type “he’s a grabby creep” is the type of thing which is far too vague in many ways and may have come from a person who is a hypersensitive ninny and slandering an otherwise innocent person’s name.
You’re just using the term “evidence” differently than I am. Perhaps not surprisingly, I’m thinking like a lawyer. To a lawyer, “evidence” is information that makes a claim appear more or less likely to be true. Not necessarily definitively true or false. Not necessarily a lot more likely to be true or false. But at least slightly more likely to be true or false. Federal Rule of Evidence 401 says that evidence is relevant if it has any tendency to make a fact more or less likely to be true (however slight).
So yes, your testimony that you were abducted by aliens makes that claim at least slightly more likely to be true than if you hadn’t so testified, and your testimony is therefore evidence and relevant to that claim.
Now clearly, a video of the alien entering your bedroom and levitating you off the bed would add substantially to the analysis by corroborating your testimony.
I might also conclude that your testimony alone was nonsense and not worthy of belief.
But regardless, it’s still “evidence” to a lawyer.
Now you’re just mansplaining. :)
Hey Cato, sorry I missed your birthday. Happy birthday!
So, Dennis Prager’s Townhall article today prompted this response from Robert Verbruggen.
While not as muscular as I would like such a response to be, he pointed out something which I found incredible – although I shouldn’t in hindsight – that being that the secular generally know more about religion than the practitioners themselves. Here’s the Quiz questions. I would be curious to see what people here got as a score.
Alas, historians are often reduced to sorting through hearsay. Historians deal with weaker evidence than what’s admissible in court or to the scientific method. (So do journalists.)
More than once, I’ve mentioned I’m not surprised when historians doubt Jesus’ divinity. But I’ve also mentioned that the accounts we have of Jesus aren’t that much different from other historical accounts from antiquity, and I know secular historians who don’t treat them as much different, though they may not believe the claim of Jesus’ divinity for themselves (their perspective also means they don’t tend to find belief in the claim all that crazy).
I got them all right. Is this one of those Facebook tests where everybody gets them all right no matter what they answer because the real purpose of the test is to get access to my friend’s emails?
This is also how Bayesians think of evidence.
I went back and read your old piece on ESP and Zombies, BTW. I don’t think I’d seen it before. Very interesting.
I got 14/15, because refresh didn’t work on the “bible as literature” question, and so I got asked the “leading prayer in school question” twice, but one of those responses was recorded for “bible as literature”, and they have opposite answers.
In other words, of the 14 questions I was actually asked, I got all 14 right. Had the “bible as literature” question properly displayed, I would have gotten it right, too.
It wasn’t anything particularly difficult. Nonetheless, people routinely don’t get them correct and to a relatively high degree. (I got them all correct as well… basically as a result of independent study.)
It just goes to show me that my experiences (while certainly not unique) and searching and attempts at looking at the underlying facts are not generally shared among a large segment of the population.
It isn’t surprising, but it is somewhat saddening.
A fun thing to think about, given the overall theme of this thread: What are the chances I’m lying about the failure of one question to display in order to explain that wrong answer?